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Lyman Trumbull (October 12, 1813 – June 25, 1896) was an American lawyer, judge, and politician who represented the state of Illinois in the United States Senate from 1855 to 1873.
Oct 8, 2024 · Lyman Trumbull was a U.S. senator from Illinois whose independent views during the Civil War and Reconstruction eras caused him to switch from the Democratic Party to the Republican to the Liberal Republican and back to the Democratic Party in his long political career.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Early Life
- Teacher and Lawyer
- Illinois Resident
- Budding Politician
- Marriages
- U.S. Senator
- Lincoln Supporter
- Radical Republican
- Confiscation Acts
- Thirteenth Amendment
Lyman Trumbull was born on October 12, 1813, in Colchester, Connecticut. He was the seventh of eleven children of Benjamin and Elizabeth (Mather) Trumbull. Benjamin Trumbull was a farmer who also served as a representative in the Connecticut legislature and as a probate judge. Elizabeth Trumbull was a descendant of the renowned New England Mather f...
As a youth, Trumbull worked on the family farm and was educated at home in the classics. Family finances prevented him from attending Yale College, as his father and grandfather had. Instead, he graduated from Bacon Academy in Colchester, after which he taught school at nearby Portland, Connecticut, and in New Jersey. In 1833, Trumbull moved to Geo...
In 1837, Trumbull moved to Belleville, Illinois, and joined the law practice of John Reynolds, a former governor of Illinois. Three years later he opened his own law office and his younger brother George later joined him.
While living in Belleville, Trumbull became active in the Democratic Party. In 1840, Illinois voters elected him to the Illinois House of Representatives, where he served until 1841. On February 27 of that year, Trumbull replaced Stephen A. Douglasas Secretary of State of Illinois. Trumbull returned to private practice in 1843 when he left office b...
Trumbull’s personal life also changed in 1843, when he married Julia Maria Jayne, a friend of Mary Todd Lincoln, in Springfield, Illinois. Their marriage, which lasted until Julia’s death in 1868, produced six children. In 1877, Trumbull married Mary Jane Ingraham, the daughter of his first cousin. That marriage produced two children, neither of wh...
In 1848, state officials appointed Trumbull as a justice on the Supreme Court of Illinois, where he served until 1853. In 1854, Illinois voters elected Trumbull to serve in the United States House of Representatives. Before he took his seat, however, the state legislature selected him to represent Illinois in the United States Senate. Trumbull serv...
Trumbull went to Washington, DC, as a Democrat, but by 1857, his opposition to the territorial expansion of slavery prompted him to switch his allegiance to the emerging Republican Party. Although Trumbull and Abraham Lincolnwere occasionally adversaries in Illinois, Trumbull supported Lincoln’s failed senatorial bid in 1858 and his successful pres...
Trumbull’s support for Lincoln waned after the American Civil War began. Trumbull gradually drifted toward the Radical Republicans in the Senate, who questioned the president’s ability to put down the rebellion. Of particular concern was the president’s reluctance to address the issues of fugitive and captured slaves.
In late July 1861, following the Union loss at the First Battle of Bull Run, Trumbull spearheaded a congressional movement to deprive the Confederacy of the use of slave labor to support the Southern cause. On August 6, over opposition from Democrats and border state politicos, Congress approved the Confiscation Act of 1861. The legislation designa...
Although Trumbull was critical of Lincoln’s leadership, he supported the president’s reelection in 1864. By that time, the two men’s views on abolition were converging. Each believed that amending the Constitution was the surest method for ending slavery in the United States. Fearing that the states might not ratify a constitutional amendment aboli...
- Harry Searles
His wife died October 20, 1828, in her forty-seventh year. Lyman Trumbull was thus in the seventh generation of the Trumbulls in America. Five brothers and two sisters of Lyman reached maturity. A family of this size could not be supported by the fees earned by a country lawyer in the early part of the nineteenth century.
While living in Belleville in November 1837, Trumbull became aware of the murder of Elijah P. Lovejoy, an abolitionist minister and newspaper publisher, in nearby Alton.
Jun 11, 2018 · He died on June 25, 1896, in Chicago. Further Reading. A number of Trumbull's senatorial speeches were published individually during his lifetime. Mark M. Krug, Lyman Trumbull: Conservative Radical (1965) remains the best treatment. An older study, by one of Trumbull's associates and admirers, is Horace White, The Life of Lyman Trumbull (1913).
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Feb 6, 2024 · Paul M. Rego’s "Lyman Trumbull and the Second Founding of the United States" gives students and scholars alike a study of the congressional career of a Democrat-turned-Republican as he advocated for important legislation to end slavery in the United States.
